Breaking news from the frontiers of neuroscience.

Forget Me Not

Having trouble remembering where you left your keys? You can improve with a little practice, says a new study.

"I've forgotten more than you'll ever...wait, what was I saying?"

It’s an idea that had never occurred to me before, but one that seems weirdly obvious once you think about it: people who train their brains to recall the locations of objects for a few minutes each day show greatly improved ability to remember where they’ve left things.

No matter what age you are, you’ve probably had your share of “Alzheimer’s moments,” when you’ve walked into a room only to forget why you’re there, or set something down and immediately forgotten where you put it. Attention is a limited resource, and when you’re multitasking, there’s not always enough of it to go around.

For people with real Alzheimer’s disease, though, these little moments of forgetfulness can add up to a frustrating inability to complete even simple tasks from start to finish. This is known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and its symptoms can range from amnesia to problems with counting and logical reasoning.

That’s because all these tasks depend on memory – even if it’s just the working memory that holds our sense of the present moment together – and most of our memories are dependent on a brain structure called the hippocampus, which is one of the major areas attacked by Alzheimer’s.

What exactly the hippocampus does is still a hotly debated question, but it seems to help sync up neural activity when new memories are “written down” in the brain, as well as when they’re recalled (a process that rewrites the memory anew each time). So it makes sense that the more we associatea particular memory with othermemories – and with strong emotions - the more easily even a damaged hippocampus will be able to help retrieve it.

But now, a team led by Benjamin Hampstead at the Emory University School of Medicine has made a significant breakthrough in rehabilitating people with impaired memories, the journal Hippocampusreports: the researchers have demonstrated that Alzheimer’s patients suffering from MCI can learn to remember better with practice.

The team took a group of volunteers with MCI and taught them a three-step memory-training strategy: 1) the subjects focused their attention on a visual feature of the room that was near the object they wanted to remember, 2) they memorized a short explanation for why the object was there, and 3) they imagined a mental picture that contained all that information.

Not only did the patients’ memory measurably improve after a few training sessions – fMRI scans showed that the training physically changed their brains:

Before training, MCI patients showed reduced hippocampal activity during both encoding and retrieval, relative to HEC. Following training, the MCI MS group demonstrated increased activity during both encoding and retrieval. There were significant differences between the MCI MS and MCI XP groups during retrieval, especially within the right hippocampus.

In other words, the hippocampus in these patients became much more active during memory storage and retrieval than it had been before the training.

Now, it’s important to point out that that finding doesn’t necessarily imply improvement – studies have shown that decreased neural activity is often more strongly correlated with mastery of a task than increased activity is – but it does show that these people’s brains were learning to work differently as their memories improved.

So next time you experience a memory slipup, think of it as an opportunity to learn something new. You’d be surprised what you can train your brain to do with a bit of practice.

Connectomics

The human brain contains more than 80 billion neurons, making several hundred trillion interconnections. The better we understand these patterns of connectivity, the better we understand ourselves.
In short, neuroscience is awesome.
This is a blog about it.